>I love reading, I want to study Literature at Univerity>Yeah, sure, what kind of book do you like?>Oh! The perks of being a wallflower, The fault in our stars, Looking for Alaska, Eleanor & Park, Divergent. ...., I can't stop reading!>Oh, sure.... I gotta go

Took an intro to fiction class at uni couple semesters ago, and in a class of about 20 people, I was the only person in there who was interested in writing literaty fiction. Everyone else wanted to write YA or that distopian YA shit like Hunger Games, except for 1 kid who wouldn't shut his mouth about GoT or LOTR.

I talked to the professor of that class later and he told me that he's been seeing that happen for the past 4 or 5 years.

The whole point of interpreting literature is just misinterpreting language. Who knows, the is a chance (an infinitely small one, but a change nonetheless) that a kid could derive Kantian ethics from John Green, just by the mere randomness of mental association.

>>6393793Yes, I am implying the opposite. Or to make it clearer, you can only draw out shallow shit from bad books. Randomness doesn't mean you got something from a book, it means you thought of something.

What's the point of these endless straw man threads? They're just idiotic sexism with nothing to back them up. "Oh, high school girls read crappy books aimed at them!" Gosh, next they'll be listening to dumb top 40 music and wearing the same clothes their friends do, and we all know that no academic minds could ever come from that kind of behaviour... except they do. All the fucking time. Plenty of people discover a passion for literature (or any other specific field) at university: it's part of the institution's mandate. Would you pompous assclowns say "Oh, that tramp doesn't even know what a clavicle is, and she's almost 18! She could never become a doctor!" or "that dumb bitch thinks she could be a psychologist someday, but she hasn't even read William James yet! What a poser." Is this really all about making yourselves feel smug and superior to the girls who didn't notice you in high school? Are you that pathetic?

>>6394312Well if you read it more closely she actually says she wants to go to Univerity. Which makes it sound like she has a cute lisp or she can't handle 5 syllable words. Thus, she's most likely underage meaning The fault in our stars is reasonably advanced reading for her. Also the whole story becomes slightly pedo, which is always good.

>>6393342>be andrew marvell>have written some very good, dark poems about a figure called "the mower">be good friends with milton, whom i consider an absolute bawler, a primo poet>letter arrives from him one day>nearly unreadable>looks like it was written by john donne's retarded offspring>decipher "hi marvell, come over to my house">the rest is just random references to scripture>go to milton's crib>nigga turned blind>ohno.printingpress>he asks me to help him get his new work down>epic long poem about the fall of man>why-was-i-not-so-divinely-inspired.faircopy>agree to help>much excitement ensues>get out quill and ink, only the most finely crafted paper>here we go>my genius friend begins his epic>"the title... paradife loft">look at him>his blind eyes going all over the place>my year long friend has clearly lost his mind>mfw this is gonna be a 10.000 line epic about a loft>mfw the main character's name is retarded>fatan

>>6393793In my experience, the only non-shallow thoughts that bad books trigger in my head are the consequence of previous reading experience having created pathways of thought that somehow link to the plot of the book. For example, I might be reading some romantic bestseller and thinking about how it reflects Bauman's theory of liquid love. Of course, there's no intention from the bestseller to trigger that thought, and in fact many times the thought is triggered by my active dislike for the ideas it does try to put forth.

In the cases where pop authors actually try to appropriate serious literature or philosophy (like John Green does), all they do is dumb it down, turn it into an aphorism, and ruin it. Every kid that has read TFioS has derived ideas about Shakespeare and classical tragedy from it, sure, but are they correct? Not really.

>>6394476I don't mean correct ideas in some moral way or anything, but just read Green's definition of hamartia and tell me it isn't incorrect. He's completely reductionist and idiotic. As for the other things, are you implying that there's no such thing as pop culture, and that authors of literary fiction have the same intent as hacks who write for money? Allow me to have a good chuckle then.

OP is 100% correct tbh. I went to one of the top ten universities in the UK to study a non-lit-related subject. I'm a casual reader at best, but I was still better-read than the vast majority of literature and languages students I met.

>>6393291>the Perks of Being a WallflowerIt's a good book. I know...every other white bitch and their bleeding rag has sopped up the leftover reputation of this book had. It's still a good book. Don't ever watch the movie.

>>6394389I agree with you, but I've met a lot of university students and adults who do what OP's describing. It's kind of like when people tell me they listen to "all kinds of music" or "everything but country." That's code for you don't listen to music. "I mostly read John Green's novels" means you probably aren't all that interested in literature. I agree that way too many people are smug about it around here, but I also kind of understand some of the rage. However, /lit/ could stand to step outside itself a little.

>>6396329>Don't ever watch the movieI saw the movie and it was one of the worst things I saw. Emma Watson's a good actress, but Daniel Radcliffe in Kill Your Darlings did a much better American accent.

I'd consider reading the book if it's actually redeemable, but considering I'm reading Camus's Sisyphus book and Sartre's Nausea right now, it wouldn't exactly be on the top of my list.

Yeah, it's this. It's not that these kinds of people aren't capable of being great in the future; it's just that they're kind of cringeworthy in a way they don't realize right NOW.

I'm from /mu/ and I can understand it in terms of music as well. I played this black girl some Gil Scott-Heron, and she thought he was bad. Like, he wrote The Revolution Is Not Televised, basically invented hip-hop…he's about one of the greatest voices for YOUR RACE in America and you think it's bad because it doesn't have butt-shaking beats to it like Beyonce? It's kind of irritating when you come across that sort of thing. I'm assuming OP's talking about the literary equivalent of that.

>>6396537Rory from Gillmore Girls. She was ridiculously patrician for a teenager, reeding more than most anons will read in their life before getting to college. She also had excellent film taste, was into experimental music, was beloved by all teachers in Yale to the point of them being openly friendly with her and had grandparents with very heavy high class connections while her mother taught her working class morals. The perfect girl in every way.

It's no different than people who become engineers because they liked playing with legos and model train sets and "building things" and always had "a knack" for math and science courses and watched pop sci television and got told they were smart by parents and teachers and "never quite fit in" and called themselves a "nerd."

It's been the case for a while that young people think their "passions" map directly to a career, because THE FUCKING BOOMERS or whoever else has been raising their children to "folloow their passions" or whatever.

>>6393291Literature departments were always filled with tasteless people. Before YA and low brown literature, those same girls just read and reurgiaged tired opinions of Dosty, Goethe and Balzac. And it was even worse than nowadays, because a YA fan might learn to apprecitiate modern literature, whereas no way in hell could Canonkiddy deviate from long, moralistic novels which can be read and interpret only in the correct way.

>>6396589>It's no different than people who become engineers because they liked playing with legos and model train sets and "building things" and always had "a knack" for math and science courses and watched pop sci television and got told they were smart by parents and teachers and "never quite fit in" and called themselves a "nerd."

>>6396560I agree that /lit/ has a problem but don't pretend that most of these people grow out of this. This is usually were they stay. Just like how most of /lit/ will continue to be butthurt about it far into the future.

>>6396682How else am I suppose to judge them? Its not like I think they are bad people, just that I don't want to talk about literature with them. Of course this is the internet and not the situation itself. Its probable that something would be said in the course of the conversation that would give reason for their favorite book being trash by my own standards and thus my opinion of them wouldn't be "shallow". But if all that was spoken, awkwardly as it may be, was "hey anon, my favorite book is X by John Green," then I would not want to talk about books with them. And if our only talking point is literature, then I would attempt some form of socially acceptable departure.

Odds are this doesn't happen because its not the internet. But right now I'm on the internet so I'm going to be a rude little shit and know that I am right for doing so.

>>6396677>You won't know true horror until you have a had a professor that was that GoT and LOTR guy.GoT and LOTR are diametrically opposite, people who like one don't like the other. Try for a more authentic approach next time.

Not necessarily. I've enjoyed (at least the on-screen renditions) of both of them. I think "USUALLY don't like the other" would make for a better, more believable premise—except then your objection wouldn't run any more. So too bad for you, it seems.

>see some suspect dude walking up to you>threat assessment alarm bells ringing>suppress said alarm bells because you don't want to "judge people instantly">get rolled or robbed because you wanted to be a politically correct snowflake and choose not to "judge people instantly"

join us in the real world m8. sometimes judging people instantly is not only practical but advised.

I don't want to sound like one of the "at least they're reading something" crowd, but if there's something you gotta give women credit for its that a lot of them read pretty voraciously, even if it's derivative shlock like OP described.

The thing is, that's your average pleb girl. Ask the average pleb dude if he reads and you will likely get a derisive laugh, or maybe if you're lucky they watched GoT and tried to read the books.

Either way, I think trying to discuss literature with people is pretty overrated anyway. If you disagree, look where you are right now.

>>6393291When this kind of thing happens to me, I let the pleb inside of me do the talk. I play along, since the "patrician" attitude within me would be too much autistic. I think it is better to talk about anything than to not talk at all.

You could try to do some kind of admonishing, but, in the end, the will to read literary fiction has to come from themselves.

>>6394542In fairness one of the main points of TFIOS as I see it is that characters are wrong ALL THE TIME. Green's said this himself.Characters use words slightly incorrectly, are slightly wrong about things. This is intentional.

You have to deal with her being a pleb until she really loves you. Then do a couple book club type thing of a book that is on the line between YA shit and respectable shit. I used The stranger for that. Then you have to slowly convert her. Like a Jewish women with pressuring parents. You can't be mean or force her you have to bait and switch it. It takes a lot of time.

>>6398767You understand that the dude has been edited OUT of the picture on the left, and not IN to the picture on the right, don't you?

At first I thought it was the other way around, and I thought "wow, that shoop on the right sure is good!" but of course it's obvious when you look at the left picture that it's actually a fairly poor shop.

Just as people generally watch movies to be entertained rather than pursue them for intellectual stimulation so does the average reader reads for entertainment and women comprise the greater percent of readers

>>6400644But it's not good artwork. Look at the stupidly out of perspective window in the bottom left quadrant. Hitler wasn't a good painter! He was a "first year art student" painter. It's like, if some serial killer in the future had a deviant art account, would people 100 years from now look at his drawings of SANIC and say "wow, he just wanted to go fast, but society wouldn't let him, so he killed jews instead?"

>>6393291dude just chill out about all that. my girlfriend likes horror & fantasy novels, is an art major getting her teaching certificate, is very punk and seemingly a nymphomaniac, is very hot and is very in to social just issues:^)

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